Dikoye Oyeyinka, 33, has been billed
as one of the most promising Nigerian writers of his generation. He went to
some of the finest schools in his West African homeland but says that like the
majority of his classmates he “didn’t know about Biafra until I was 14
When he did begin to find out about
the brutal civil war that nearly tore Nigeria apart, it was not in the
classroom. Instead it was a schoolmate in his dormitory who showed him a
separatist leaflet demanding Nigeria’s southeast break away from the rest of
the country. Before then Oyeyinka had known nothing about how leaders from the
Igbo ethnic group declared the independent state of Biafra in 1967.
He knew
nothing of the conflict that resulted and the 30 months of fighting and famine
estimated to have cost over a million lives before the secessionists surrendered
50 years ago in January 1970.
“We’ve had a very brutal history,
the older generation went through a lot of trauma,” Oyeyinka told AFP. “We just
sweep it under the carpet, pretending nothing happened. But without knowing our
history we will repeat the same mistakes.
Our history is a succession of
deja-vu.” It was to try to break this cycle of ignorance that the Oyeyinka
wrote the novel Stillborn – a historic epic about Nigeria from the days of
British colonial rule in 1950 to 2010. In it the civil war is the pivotal
event.
– ‘Our history, our conflict’ –
Unlike other famed Nigerian writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with her
novel Half Of A Yellow Sun, or Chinua Achebe’s memoir There Was A Country,
Oyeyinka is one of the few non-Igbo writers to have dwelt on the conflict. “An
Igbo friend got angry at me and said ‘You can’t write about us, it’s our
conflict’,” he recounted.
But Oyeyinka insists that all Nigerians need to be
made aware of what happened. “We need to address these traumas ourselves, as a
country, otherwise we are a tinder box ready to explode.” While in the rest of
Africa’s most populous nation many know little about the history of Biafra, in
the former capital of the self-proclaimed state at Enugu the memory of those
years lives on
Biafran flags — an iconic red, black and green with a
rising golden sun — make appearances on the front of buildings and hardline
separatists still demand independence.
The leader of the
breakaway Republic of Biafra, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, went into exile for
13 years before being pardoned. He returned to Nigerian politics but was
detained for 10 months in prison.
Leading Nigerian intellectual Pat Utomi says
that many Igbos — the country’s third-biggest ethnic group after the Hausa and
the Yoruba — still feel marginalised. One key event was when current President
Muhammadu Buhari — then a military chief — seized power in 1983, and stopped
the only Igbo aspirant to get close to leading Nigeria since the war from
becoming head of state.
‘More divided’
Nowadays any incident — from the
closure of the only airport in the southeast last year to the sacking of Igbo
shops by customs officials in economic hub Lagos — can cause grievances to
flare. “It’s important to deal with history, to write it down. In Nigeria, we
try to cover it up,” Utomi said. “We are more divided today than we’ve ever
been before the civil war. We learnt nothing from it.”
In
order to try to heal the rifts, Utomi helped organise a “Never Again”
conference aiming to bring together key cultural and political figures to
discuss the lessons of the Biafra war half a century after it ended.
He is also
a patron of the “Centre for Memories” in Enugu, a combination of a museum and
library where visitors can come and “dig into history”.
‘History is essential’
History itself has been absent from
Nigerian schools. The current government reintroduced it only from last term as
an obligatory subject for pupils aged 10 to 13, after more than a decade off
the curriculum.
“Teaching history is essential to build our identity as a
country, and defend our patriotic values,” said Sonny Echono, permanent
secretary at the education ministry. But schools still remain woefully short of
qualified history teachers and there is no unified narrative about the civil
war which does not figure in the lessons.
“We need to teach the war in our
schools,” said Egodi Uchendu, a history professor at University of Nsukka, in
the former Biafra territory. “Eastern Nigeria is completely different from how
it was experienced in other parts of the country. We need to bring in the
different angles to it.”
Chika Oduah, a Nigerian-American
journalist, has crossed the country to collect hundreds of testimonies of the
victims and combatants of the Biafra conflict which she publishes on her
website Biafran War Memories. She says that for many of those she interviewed
it was the first time they had retold the horrors of the period.
“A
70-something former soldier… broke down crying, when he told me how he lost his
brother during the war,” she said. She herself only learnt at the age of 17
that her mother as a child spent two years in a camp for displaced people. “Our
parents wanted to move on, not look at the past,” Oduah insisted. “But we need
to talk about it, otherwise we won’t heal”.
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